Enhancing Dplot for publication quality

[imadahmed]

HI David,

I am using Dplot since sometime and I like it. I published two papers in which I used Dplot to generate my graphs. However, I still have few problems in enhancing the quality of my plots. For example, control on curve thickness seems not to work if you changed thickness from 0.1 to 0.3 nothing happen; 0.4 mm seems thicker than I hoped for.

Secondly, may I suggest to improve the appearance of arrows (especially heads). Also, these arrows are sometimes not very flexible in a busy plot and maybe adding the possibility of a curved arrows would be useful.

Thirdly, the \n operator which we use to add a line between the axis and its title is great but I am hoping for more control on this one as I wish if I can reduce the spacing to 1.5 line spacing

Another thing, I always have multiple curves and would like to stack them together in one plot but with specifying an equal spacing between them (this can be done in excel by adding an incremental value to all data), Would it be possible to get this done in Dplot?

Many Thanks,
Imad

[DPlotAdmin]

For example, control on curve thickness seems not to work if you changed thickness from 0.1 to 0.3 nothing happen; 0.4 mm seems thicker than I hoped for.

The line widths are always rounded to the nearest multiple of device units (pixels, printer dots, etc.). So on your display 0.01" may be identical to 0.02". When printed out the difference will be much more obvious. Same with metafiles, since the psuedo-resolution used in those is 2540 dpi.

The other thing to remember is that if you check "Specify size" and that size won't fit within the document window (or within the printer margins when printing), all line widths and font sizes will be scaled down proportionately.

Secondly, may I suggest to improve the appearance of arrows (especially heads). Also, these arrows are sometimes not very flexible in a busy plot and maybe adding the possibility of a curved arrows would be useful.

Good idea, thanks.

Thirdly, the \n operator which we use to add a line between the axis and its title is great but I am hoping for more control on this one as I wish if I can reduce the spacing to 1.5 line spacing

It uses single line spacing now. I'm a little reluctant to reduce that, as that might produce overlapping text depending on the characters used. But I'll look into it.

Another thing, I always have multiple curves and would like to stack them together in one plot but with specifying an equal spacing between them (this can be done in excel by adding an incremental value to all data), Would it be possible to get this done in Dplot?

Stacked plots are on my to-do list but it may be a while before this gets done. If you have some patience and don't mind manipulating the data, you can do this now by shifting curves up or down, possibly multiplying Y values by some constant, and using the X,Y Labels command to subsitute the actual values for the nonsense values you'd now have along each axis. That's what I've done in the graph at the bottom of this page:

http://herring-cycling.com/maps/vmp3.html

(But it does require some patience.)